Dear all,
 I have a dataset with students nested in schools and also schools belong
 to each district. The data was explicitly nested as previous examples.
 In my case, I don't care the variance between schools or district,and I
 just want to assess the effect of different teaching
methods,traditionally,the model can be specified in lmer like :
 lmer(score~method+(1|district/school),data)
 notes: the method was a factor(m1.......m10)
 in my study ,I want to know the variance between methods,and I also use
some
covariates at method level to explain the variance between methods.
 I construct the unconditional model and conditional models like these:
unconditional model :lmer(score~1+(1|method)+(1/district/school),data)
 conditional model :lmer(score~1+CK+(1|method)+(1/district/school),data)
 the CK indicates the evaluation score for each method.

What I want to confirm is whether the specification of all the models was
 reasonable and correct in lmer.
Any help will be appreciated.
 yours,
 Lei Chen

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